The Lioness

She looked where he pointed and saw motion in the dooryard. The four humans wore faint outlines of light. Her elf eyes saw not only the flesh and bone shape of them, but the heat of their blood running, their life-force glimmering. They stood like red ghosts in the dooryard, and among them stood Felyce.

“She’s all right,” Ander said with a relieved breath.

Kerian stilled him with a gesture. Behind the sounds of the dawn, the first sleepy chirp of birds, a brook talking to itself, the wind rising then falling, she heard the voices of those in the dooryard. One Knight turned from speech with a fellow and nodded curtly to Felyce. Something small spun through the air between them, the first light winking on it. A coin dropped into the dooryard at Felyce’s feet The Knights kicked up their horses and rode out from the farmhouse yard, heading south. To the Green Lea, then, to Headsman Chance.

“Wait,” Kerian said to Ander. “Wait, and soon we’ll follow.”

In the forest others moved, Jeratt and his band of six. They didn’t move to join Kerian or pursue the Knights. Seven weaponed elves, outlaws and soldiers of an old, nearly forgotten cause, melted into the darkness of the wood and went by various ways to the Qualinost Road.

Kerian waited until she felt they must be well on their way. She smiled, thinking of a vise, and softly said, “Now Ander. Now we go.”

Four Knights rode through the graying forest. One professed himself pleased to see the sun pinking the sky, one smiled to see the shadows fade. Another watched the day prick out glitter on the stream they rode beside. His fellows also watched the water. A dragon’s enforcers, the strong arm of a Skull Knight, they went as though they were lords of the forest. One hawked and spat, the phlegm of a night of drinking from the widow’s wine cellar. In the pines, a jay shouted. From across the purling stream, another answered. Behind, the water splashed, two Knights turned and saw nothing but morning mist rising on the banks. Two others turned right and left, expecting to see the forest shimmer. The trees remained still. Not even the long, thin needles of the pines stirred in the morning breeze.

A horse snorted. One Knight slipped a hand low, gripping the pommel of the sword at his hip. The gesture sent tension running among them. Other hands touched weapons, seats shifted for balance.

Now they realized they heard no other kind of bird, just a riot of jay voices as they went carefully downstream.

When it came at last, the wasping of an arrow flown, it sounded like thunder in the ear of the man it passed, felt like lightning in the eye of man it struck.

The forest erupted in howling, in war cries and fury.

Kerian ran before them all, one of seven elves pouring down the slopes of the forest.

“The horses!” she cried. “I told you—kill the damn horses first!”

Fire-haired Briar leaped to the fallen Knight and snatched up his sword. She gutted the horse of the Knight who turned to strike her. She swung upward and hacked the Knight’s leg at the knee, severing it and unleashing the shower of blood that would be his death.

Screaming, two more horses went down. Blood steamed in the cold air, the thick reek of it hanging. A Knight, caught beneath the bulk of his fallen steed, screamed as his beast writhed in its own agony. The screaming became a bubbling groan. Kerian shouted again, in Elvish, a language none of these Knights understood. Two of her outlaws lifted their voices in ululating cries. When the echo of those cries was gone, so were the elves.

In the eerie silence, now afoot, the two remaining Knights stood back to back, each with swords held high. Their breaths, panting, streamed out gray on the brightening air. One looked north, the other south. One looked west, his fellow east. They saw nothing. They heard nothing but the death struggle of the horses.

Silence fell upon the little glade, thick as a funeral pall.

“Where?” whispered one.

The other shook his head. He saw nothing, no one, only the dead and dying.

In shadows thick as night beneath dark pines, Kerian drew a silent breath. Beside her Ander crouched, an arrow knocked to bow. Kerian felt him quicken with excitement, the muscles of his shoulder close against hers quivering. Wind shifted.

“Wait,” she said, the word only a motion of lips.

Ander breathed through his nose, silent.

“Wait,” Kerian said again. Behind her, her outlaws had become as stone again.

The two Knights put the distance of a step between each other’s back. They consulted in quiet voices. Knights with no foe to fight, no enemy upon whom to take revenge, they turned and left the glade. Their weapons glittered in the new light of day, but neither sword had tasted blood, and this was their disgrace.

Kerian gestured to her fighters, a simple command: Let them go.